Fair Weather Vegan

Top Five Reasons To Take Your Family To A WPS Game This Season

We interrupt our regularly scheduled food blogging to tell you about the launch of Women's Pro Soccer.  The Bay Area team plays its first home game today at 3 p.m. in Santa Clara.  There are also teams in Atlanta, Boston, the New York tri-state area, Chicago, LA, St Louis, and Washington. 

5. No drunken fans spewing egregious profanity (and no cheerleaders!)
   An atmosphere of respect in which you won't have beer spilled on you by the guy in the next seat.    
   I'm not saying there won't be a few muttered curse words, possibly from me....
4. Encounter athletes as human beings
   They will actually talk to you. 
3. A chance for all types of families to feel comfortable
    For once, inclusive family values means just that.
2. Low ticket prices
  Small stadiums guarantee great value for the dollar
1. The chance to see the most elite players in the world getting paid to play soccer. 
  Priceless. 

I'm proud to have my first set of season tickets, and I hope you will join me in supporting the WPS! 

How Progressive Are You?

"Your ideological score is 354/400.  This makes you extremely progressive.  The average score for Americans is 209.5."  So says the Center for American Progress thanks to their new interactive quiz.  I suspect the reason I didn't score higher is that I'm still not sure that some of the orthodox economic models, in concert with an active government, don't actually work okay.  Haven't seen enough data.  Meanwhile, the average "liberal democrat" score is only 247.1, and the number jumps appreciably between those who have a high school education versus those with post-graduate degrees.  Although sanity would dictate that this means a correlation between more education and more progressive views, and thus progressivism is a good thing, the right would no doubt say we have been brain-washed by the elite. They have some trouble with the concept of what 'education' means. 

Hell Is A PBS Pledge Drive

Please, please let there be some extra money for public broadcasting coming from the Obama government soon.  Then we might see daylight on the Tunnel of Endless Fundraising at the Bay Area's PBS stations.  It used to be that PBS would accost us every six months or so, and tried to incentivize the process by showing productions like Into the Woods.  Now the cycle seems to have picked up to once every two months, and what beggars logic is that we would give to a PBS station because we enjoy the programming, and at pledge drive time they take that programming off the air.  I am already not inclined to reward people who replace Masterpiece and Independent Lens, and it compounds the issue when the replacement has turned into a steady stream of hucksters, or what the Scienceblog people might call purveyors of Woo.  Based on the responses from heads of PBS stations, it seems to be that the target audience for pledge drives is not the average PBS viewer but the extra, non-regular viewers they can suck in through airing infomercials by self-help gurus who profess wisdom culled from bastardizing several religious traditions, worshippers of the rich, and 'doctors' who would not recognize a double-blind trial if it smacked them with a rubber chicken.  It's troubling to lend the trusted PBS name to people who range from harmless new-age loons to downright dangerous charlatans.  Daniel Amen and his phrenology machine, anyone?  Then you have to watch as the PBS employees fawn all over them like they've discovered a cure for cancer.  These are exactly the kind of scams being investigated on Bill Moyers the rest of the year.... Would it not make more sense to cultivate the viewers who are there for the station the rest of the time by rewarding them with extra airings of their favorites?   Instead the pledge drive is the time of year (or month, at this point), during which I turn off PBS, and thus turn off any chance at intelligent, informative TV. 

Oh, Katie Perry, Just Shut Up

She first charmed us with a homophobic little dance number disguised as something provocative.  "It's not what good girls do," ey?  Leave your adolescent rebellion out of other people's liberation struggles, 'kay thx bye.  Then she followed up with  another dance track in which the central conceit was 'girls are moody and emotional and crazy, and my boyfriend's like a girl.' Ha ha ha, how fresh and hilarious!  Driving on the 280 yesterday, I heard a sound like crows cawing emerging from my radio, and thought to myself 'gosh, Alanis usually knows what material suits her voice, and this is awfully jejeune material for her.  I wonder if it's...good god, it's a Katie Perry ballad.'  Stop, Katie, for the good of the planet and specifically the female portion of it, who have taken enough shit from you for one year. 

Guest Poster: Jasper S-B

My parents have gone to Tierra Del Fuego, a place they claim there aren't any squirrels, but I know better.  They have put someone else in my house to take care of me.  I'm pretending I don't notice.  I am also pretending I don't understand her when she speaks.  For a while I wouldn't even go into the kitchen to get my food and make her bring it to me instead, but I decided that was stupid.  Of course I follow here wherever she goes.  You have to, because who knows what they are up to behind closed doors. 

She's not as much fun as mom and dad.  We took our long walk at noon instead of five because she doesn't like how cold it's getting at night (she keeps muttering 'just like Indiana' whatever that means), and she didn't take me to the usual meet-up at the elementary school.  Like mom and dad she talks to me a lot, but she talks in a kind of way like I'm another person.  She's told me about poker, but I'm not interested.  Thank goodness they got me a new beef bone before they left.  I will say that I appreciate how much time she spends on the couch.  She makes a decent heater and she's pretty understanding of the different ways to sleep, and good at belly rubs.  Weirdly she doesn't join me in my nap when she's on the couch, she looks at her white box which is like others I've seen but makes funny noises (I checked for squirrels, but none so far).  The strangest thing, though, is that she hasn't brought home any meat.  I investigated closely, and she has only eaten a strangely-shaped bready thing and something that smelled like melting cheese at first but she said was full of vegemables which I wouldn't like.  She even cleaned her hands after eating the big thing of chocolate so when I licked them I didn't get any.  Although she says it would make me sick, this is silly human propaganda.  Again, thank the lord for the beef bones. 

Last night I even had to teach her about sleeping, since she seemed determined to stick me in that stupid crate and we were in that freezing room with the bed they don't let me get on.  I did my vulture impression and sat up staring sadly out at her even after had turned out the light.  I think she'd actually dozed off since I had to cry to get her attention.  I'm lucky since my cry sounds like a growl and she didn't like that at all.  At long last she got up and took me out of the crate and we went to mom and dad's room where I sleep in the regular bed.  She said something about 'okay, but if I die I'm going to kill you' and she was trying to keep her pillow far from my part of the bed but I was busy trying to get my blanket in just the right set of folds and that takes a lot of concentration and effort.  She also has very bad manners and was far from grateful when I was sure to get us up for a walk just when she sun the rising so we could get a good start to our day.  She showed me her little black box and said it wasn't 7 yet but of course that didn't make any sense so she gave up.  And then she even made me wait while she put on dad's big fleece and mom's grey hat.  But it is already in the past!  There is a big day ahead for me: I have to growl at strange noises, see if she finally gets some meat, and she says she's taking me to the meet-up tonight.  But now she's back on the couch.  Gotta go hop on her legs or she'll be disappointed. 

The Z-Team

Know what's a brilliant solution to an intractable problem?  Take the guy who helped cause the problem and  put him in charge of fixing it.  Then also hire his mentor, a guy who was forced out of his last job.  For ideological balance you can hire two sane-seeming women, and since the mentor is known to be a yeller and a misogynist, place them both in positions inferior to his.  I clearly should have made all of these suggestions in my cabinet list. 

Some Cabinet Suggestions For Our New President- Updated

We already know President-Elect Obama has chosen a pretty conventional transition team, and they're set to influence him to choose a conventional, if not conservative, cabinet.  And given that the American people have already weighed in in the millions to help the Obamas choose a new dog, it's not that far of a stretch to offer my help on other denizens of the capitol. Readers who are not wonks can go to a few sites that helped me decide to support his candidacy in the end ;)   

Secretary of the Treasury (the job with the most candidates because oddly enough I know the most about it):
Dean Baker- not only an honest-to-god progressive populist, but has managed to work with neo-liberal institutions like the World Bank so has the cred with this crowd. 
James K. Galbraith- The apple, it does not fall far from the tree.
Nouriel Roubini- A dire, unrestrained pessimist may be exactly what we need for a change.  My only worry is that I'm not actually sure about his fiscal policies, just that he correctly predicted every aspect of this current situation months ago. 

Defense Secretary:
Chuck Hagel- token Republican, extremely measured and thoughtful on these issues.  Considered him as SoS, but his views on abortion are not something I want as part of our foreign policy.

Press Secretary:
Rachel Maddow- I wrote more about this over at WSB. The girls just love her. 

Attorney General:
Patricia Williams- Sure, she hasn't set foot in a courtroom in years, but wouldn't it be nice to have someone heading the Justice Department to whom the name wasn't an oxymoron? 
Lani Guinier- Let's give her another shot at that 'radical' agenda of making the legislature actually reflect the diversity of the country. 
Lawrence Lessig- He's still a genius, but I felt better about him before he decided that we shouldn't use the court system to defend people's rights against Prop 8, not because we'll probably lose but because of some wacky idea that we actually need to convince the voters that other people are deserving of rights.  No, see, protecting "unpopular minorities" is what the court system is for.  See Roehmer v. Evans, 1996. 

Secretary of Education:
Michael Berube.  At least the department will exist in an Obama presidency. 

Secretary of Labor:
Van Jones- This suggestion was made by a poster on My Left Wing and it's a good one.  He actually cares about things like combining working-class job creation with environmental protection, and not putting all the dangerous stuff in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.  I actually don't know his views on unions but he does live in Oakland.   

Proud To Be A Hoosier and An American, Embarassed To Be A Californian

A few generations ago, this man would have been bought and sold as property.  In our parents' lifetimes he would have been beaten or even killed in many places if he tried to vote.  Now he's the president of the United States.  He won at least one state with a terrible history of racial violence and a 90+% white population, where people put aside their prejudices and paid attention to our common national aspirations. 

Meanwhile, a certain state's population are in the process of deciding* that their neighbors aren't worthy of basic human rights.  But they're holding on desperately because their time is already over. Justice can prevail in the United States, and last night the country came together and declared we're ready. 

*The vote hasn't been called yet, but the 'yes' votes have already totalled over 50%. 

Bailing Out Plutocrats is NOT Socialism

If you want to see a socialist economic plan, parts of which even I, who have long identified somewhere on the pinko spectrum, am mildly uncomfortable with, look at the Green Party 2004 platform.  It's about giving control of corporations to their employees and placing them under democratic scrutiny, in other words using them to promote social values. But government interventionism is not limited and has never been limited to the left. Has everyone conveniently forgotten another rather influential political movement?  Fascism also advocates nationalization of the economy.  There were thousands of Americans sympathetic to fascism during the Depression, and they only went away (sort of) when the war with Germany made them an embarrassment.  Some of them were at rather high levels in politics and the army, and they advocated allying with Germany in a war against the Soviet Union.  The point is not that this particular set of financial plans is fascist, but rather that government's involvement in day-to-day economic operations, if it doesn't even pretend to aid the most disadvantaged, is not socialist. Words have meanings.  Jeez. 

Animal Planet Addendum

Do you notice the makers of the shows never talk to the people of color who work in the international animal sanctuaries?  They either speak only to the white owners or they bring in attractive white volunteers for a brief space of time.  Seriously, how hard can it be to interview the damn employees who do all the work?  Sigh.  I also don't mean to indict the actual people on the shows, since probably their values are a lot better than the network's.